Structured products based enterprise management system

Abstract

The field of invention is in Information Technology based management systems for the natural gas, data communications, electricity, medical, government supply chain and vehicle markets. The disclosed system manages core commercial activities and business for companies in these industries. These systems are specifically designed to not only handle complex transactions but to also allow the same system to be used across all core business functions, including: marketing, sales, contracting, production, delivery, business optimization and financial settlement.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] Not Applicable FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH [0002] Not Applicable SEQUENCE LISTING OR PROGRAM [0003] Not Applicable BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION—FIELD OF INVENTION [0004] The field of invention is in information technology based systems that manage core business activities specifically those business activities that are complex in nature. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0005] Most e-commerce transactions are simple in nature. For example, the retailer to consumer business process is a direct sequence of events; browse a catalog, make a selection, make a payment using a credit card and deliver the purchased product. The entire transaction is completed with a single interaction between the seller and the buyer. This type of transaction does not reflect the complex nested transactions of many of today's commercial transactions. Transactions in the business world are often long lived propositions, involving: negotiations, commitments, contracts...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0039] In one aspect, the disclosed system serves as a development language for business users. CommerceNet is working on a Common Business Language (CBL) to blend e-commerce components into their evolving eCo System architecture. Other high level tools, such as VisualAge for Java, serve as component assemblers that suppress the details and complexity of the underlying technologies and systems. Basic, Pascal and similar high-level languages were created to hide the complexity of machine code. The novelty in the structured products system is that the language of the business user is used to create the business functions. The disclosed system lies between the abstract level of CommerceNet and higher-level languages. This business user accessibility allows for the creation of truly agile business solutions.

[0041] An additional feature of the disclosed invention is the exposure of the Right parameters to the business user. The parameters are accessible and, therefore, allow Rights to be configured as a typical business user builds them into services.

[0042] Another novel feature of the disclosed system allows for the Rights to be associated into complex structures, such that they depend upon other Rights or services. This allows for both Rights and services to be inter-related. This results in one Right or service having the ability to affect others, depending upon the actual utilization of the Right or service adopted by the customer.

Problems solved by technology

Mainly limited to two functionalities: cataloging on one side and payment facilities on the other side.

The current electronic commerce world is in practice a lot less sophisticated than real world commerce where several levels of interaction can take place between potential client and vendor, and several levels of intermediaries can act or interfere.

Otherwise inter-operability is impossible.

The most difficult aspect of inter-operability is to gain global agreement and definition of the underlying processes and procedures—an effort that has eluded information systems designers since the introduction of centralized databases.

Thus, XML enables the use of the consistent business semantics but does not provide for the complex processes or functions.

Without consistent business semantics, the business processes and workflows cannot be shared between multiple organizations or even inter-company departments.

However, even with consistent semantics the task knowledge needed for such activity, adaptive business processes and workflows, overwhelms current software paradigms.

Today's intelligent agent technology is still in its infancy and, therefore, cannot approach the knowledge base required to prepare transactions.

Through some hard learned lessons, corporations now know that it is insufficient to wire together machines through a network using a client / server architecture.

Such processes may be scattered across an organization resulting in integrity and complexity problems when they are integrated.

These spaghetti architectures failed to create a unified enterprise information infrastructure.

While technology objects simplify coding, they do not address the business applications or business semantics.

While at an abstract level the use of objects to manage business processes is both appealing and practical, implementation problems exist.

However, the true benefits of component assembly will not be realized without the disclosed structured products approach providing the framework to which the components may be attached.

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